Instasize makes subscriptions a success, announce $14 million in revenue and 500,000 paid subs
Social photo editing app Instasize has turned a lot of heads recently, with its announcement of its burgeoning subscription revenues and user base. (See press release below). Recently, Forbes featured the company’s three founders – all with immigrant parents – who have found success in the rough and tumble world of photo apps. The Dead Pixels Society spoke with one of the founders, Hector Lopez, about the company’s continued success.
Since its start in 2012, the scrappy, self-funded company has gained followers and success by listening to its customers. At first, the free app was designed specifically to contend with short-comings of Instagram; smartphones take rectangular photos, while Instagram requires square ones. At the time, there weren’t convenient tools for cropping square photos for Instagram and for Facebook.
Thus Instasize was born, and with intense social-media marketing, the app grew a following. The Instasize team, however, knew their advantage was short-lived. After all, the app was just a cropping tool.
The important thing, Lopez says, is to be where the customers are. Looking at how social media influencers were using Instagram gave them insight into the next direction.
“We had to learn photo and video editing,” says Lopez, “so we built a team around that.”
Lopez says one of the distinctions between Instasize and its competitors in the social-media photo editing app field is the emphasis on “natural-looking filters, which make a positive change, where it’s not an obvious change.”
Instasize generates revenues from a premium $4.99 monthly subscription, which includes an ever-expanding set of more than 100 filters, more than 80 borders, image-correction tools, and exclusive content from leading social influencers.
Keeping up with those social media influencers takes a lot of effort and staff time. “We look at trends on social and editing, and what is happening,” says Lopez. “We have various feeds and reach a consensus of what is trending. We have a lot of people who are photography focused and have on pulse of what’s going on.”
Lopez sees the subscription-based model as gaining popularity, as content-driven services like Netflix, Apple Music, and so on gain popularity. That’s why the company is reinvesting revenues in expanding its 38-person team so they can create more content for subscribers and build the pipeline with more tools for social creators.
The next steps for Instasize are to do more with video. “We found a video to be a tough thing to make,” says Lopez. “We are building video templates for people to create videos, and intros and outros, and make editing more mainstream.”
The full press release is reproduced below:
Instasize announces $14 million in revenue, 12 million monthly users and 500,000 paid subscribers for 2018
The visual app and toolkit for content creators focuses on achieving 1 million paid subscribers by 2020
Jan. 23, 2019—Salt Lake City, Utah—Instasize, a visual toolkit for social media content creators, today announces that it achieved $14 million in revenue, and reached 12 million monthly users and 500,000 paid subscribers in 2018. The popular app was downloaded 50 million times in the Google Play store and ranks in the Top 40 Photo/Video Apps in the Apple Store.
“Instasize exists to provide social creatives with the tools, education and opportunities they need to grow, whether that’s helping users create engaging content or empowering and guiding users in monetizing their social platforms,” said co-founder and CEO, Hector Lopez. “We’re ecstatic about the rapid growth of the Instasize community and are so inspired by the content produced by our users.”
Instasize is a one-stop shop for perfecting and preparing content for social sharing, eliminating the need to switch back and forth between apps to achieve the final product. The app includes exclusive editing capabilities like:
- Beauty Tools—Remove Acne spots and blemishes
- Borders
- Whiten—Make smiles shine and brighten the whites of eyes
- Skin Glow
- Pro Fonts & Text Editor—Add text to photos and videos, choose from over 50 unique fonts.
- Enhancing Filters for Photos and Videos
- Social Media Formatting—Instantly resize photo and videos to fit perfectly on Instagram, Instagram Stories, YouTube, Facebook and more.
- Collage Maker
Instasize also collaborates with Instagram influencers to offer signature filter collections from trendsetters such as Charly Jordan and Sommer Ray. In 2018, Instasize received shout-outs by celebrity users including Drake, Millie Bobby Brown, Jennifer Hudson, and others.
“Our main objective in 2019 is amplifying our product and platform through partnerships and app updates, as well as expanding our team to ensure we’re delivering the most value possible to the Instasize community,” noted COO & co-founder, Omar Arambula.
CFO & co-founder, Eddy Homez added, “With this progress, our goal is to double Instasize subscribers to 1 million by 2020.”
The basic Instasize app is free while the Premium Subscription is $4.99 a month, providing access to an entire collection of filters, beauty retouching tools and professional fonts—updated monthly and even weekly. Instasize is available for download in the App Store and Play Store.
About Instasize
Instasize—a visual toolkit for social media content creators— was founded in 2012 by Hector Lopez, Eddy Homez and Omar Arambula, a team of college friends with immigrant parents. Instasize exists to provide social creatives with the tools, education and opportunities they need to grow. Through the app users can resize, edit and transform RAW images for social sharing. One of Utah’s fastest- growing companies, Instasize has 12 million monthly users, 500,000 premium paying subscribers,50 million downloads in the Google Play store and ranks in the Top 40 Photo/Video Apps in the Apple store.
Instasize is available for download in the App Store and Play Store. For more information, visit www.instasize.com.